This section is from the book "Human Sexuality", by J. Richardson Parke. Also available from Amazon: Human Sexuality.
Homogeneity between the evu and its remedy ought to be fundamental in the treatment of crime. Dumesnil has said that, as the criminal is a moral (Ferri adds physical) patient, more or less curable, we must apply to him the great art of medicine. Pathological ills require pathological remedies; and, if the maxim of Zwinglius be true, that original sin is not sin but disease1—originale peccatum non est peccatum sed morbum—a maxim which recent developments along psychological fines more and more confirm, possibly we may live to see the day when the application of correctional methods—the present hypothetical basis of reformative penology— Bhall include an enlightened recognition of man's triple nature—mental, moral and physical; and the conviction that to inflict injury upon the second and third components of his being, for a fault of the first, is to exceed the inherent prerogative of society, to stultify moral perception, and to return to the barbarous lex talionis of the feudal ages, which punished the servant for the fault of his master.
' The distinction between sin and crime is rather of modality than essence. One concerns the individual, the other, society. When Adam disobeyed, he sinned against God. When Cain slew Abel, he committed a crime against communal right. One concerns ethics, the other concerns law. One is rudimentary to the individual, the other, complex, and relates to society; so that every criminal act is at once a sin againHt the private and the public conscience. Therefore the quotation is apposite, since all crimes are of necessity sins.
In this connection, the psychological one, a vast field of interesting thought opens to the mental view. But in the present chapter, written somewhat hastily, and to satisfy merely an after-thought of the publishers, while the body of the work was in press, space compels me to be brief, and to confine myself to the barest generalizations. The one thought which it is my »vm to urge, throughout, is the relation of psychology to sexual crime. For, after all, no arbitrary line of distinction can be drawn between sexual and non-sexual offences, so far as they relate to the law. Common principles apply to both; the one great point being, that as crime is a psycho-logical and pathological, und not physical nor wholly moral manifestation, the ethics of society demand that it be relegated to alienistic, rather than to strictly legal, jurisdiction. Justice is anterior to law; and the essence of right, being an innate concept of the human bouI, remains always unchangeable. It is my firm conviction, based on some degree of both experience and thought, and supported by many distinguished criminologists, that in a vast majority of concrete crimes—both sexual and non-sexual—there will be found more or less involvement of the cerebral centers; and that a careful study of criminals will determine a marked frequency in the relations of their social delinquencies with certain forms of contracted or congenital disease, as well as abnormal mental conditions of a pathological type;1 demonstrating the paramount necessity, in any attempt to deal with such cases, in conformity with the established principles of justice, of the closest possible cooperation between the sister sciences, Law and Medicine; for, as Dr. Paul Gamier well says, the special knowledge necessary for the interpretation of pathological and psychological facts, however brilliant and judicious a jurist may be, is entirely beyond the limits of his domain.
1 "Anexamination of the brains of criminals, whilst it reveals in them an inferiority of form and histological type, gives, in a great majority of cases, indications of disease which were frequently undetected in their lifetime."—Enrico Ferri, Professor of Criminal Law, Deputy to the Italian Parliament.
M. Dally, who, for upwards of twenty years past, has devoted himself, with exceptional ability, to problems of forensical law, says, without hesitancy, that "all the criminals who have been subjected to autopsy (after execution) gave evidence of cerebral injury." (Proceedings Medico-Psychological Society of Paris, 1881.)
A notable example of the one-sided character of treatment which the criminal commonly receives is furnished in the results of the Lombroso school of criminologists. In the work of Colajanni, for instance, three hundred and ninety-jour pages are given to cranial measurements, physiognomy, atavism and anthropological classification, generally; and only six to the criticism 0} psychological types, (Vid, "Socialism and Criminal Sociology," Dr. Napol. Colajanni, Catania, 1889.)
 
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